Finally, after about 7 months of planning, writing, coding, and arting (that is now a word), I've got enough material to warrant a gamepage! And I checked off the short term goal of getting New and Notable! We're off the a pretty good start, if I do say so myself, but now the challenge is carrying that momentum going forward. I'd like to start off but talking about the top two priorities for PotF:

- A character-centric story reinforced through gameplay. Since character development is my favorite thing to do in literally any creative work, not just gameplay, that's at the front and center of PotF. If you haven't already, check out the Character list. It's got a detailed description of the characters you can play as during the prologue, although you'll meet most of the cast as well. Those that have played Soul Sunder know what I mean. It's going to be a bit tougher this time around since PotF has TWO main characters, but I think I can pull it off.

Let me tell you, though: I'm really liking these characters. They all have distinct personalities reflected in their battle styles. It's been so much fun playing with them and writing their dialogue. I hope that comes across when you get to play it!


- Giving players as much control over the battles as possible. This may be an unpopular opinion, but one of my biggest beefs with RPGs nowadays is the reliance on the RNG for hits, misses, criticals, etc. If I select an attack, I expect said attack to hit the opponent, especially if there's no indication that enemies can dodge attacks. So I made a few minor changes: Crticial values default at 0%, and accuracy and evasion defaults to 100% and 0% respectively. These values will change, of course, but you will be made aware of when they do, allowing you to adjust your strategy accordingly.

What I want to happen is, if players get a game over during a fight, they'll learn from that death and can come back and adjust their strategy accordingly. If you do everything right, you should never get screwed over by RNG.


Speaking of the battles, this is not going to play even REMOTELY similar to Soul Sunder for one specific reason: the reworked item system. The biggest flaw in SS BY FAR was the glitchy items. No, I'm not pointing any fingers because there's too many things that went wrong back then to lay the blame on any one person, but I vowed never to use that combination of scripts again. Problem is, the entire game was built around that system. So once the item management was gutted, it created balancing problems with enemies, which created balancing problems with character skills, which eventually snowballed into a situation where half the entire game's system had to be scrapped/reworked. Essentially, this entire game, despite being a, "sequel," is completely different from its predecessor.

Which is good, right? No need to worry about Sequel Syndrome since this isn't going to play like SS, right? Cool.


Now, what can you actually PLAY? Well, at the moment, I've got about half the prologue done and playable. Not enough for a release, but enough to start sharing my progress. Without battles and speeding through dialogue, the current build has about 10 minutes of content. That's pretty good.

The original plan was to release the prologue once it's completed. Now, I'm not too sure. Of course, I'll eventually release the entire prologue, but I'm wondering if a small teaser would be appropriate. It'll give you a glimpse of what's to come and it'll give me the precious feedback that I've been starving for for so long.


Sorry for being so long winded. Can you tell I'm kinda excited about this? I've spent a looooooong time planning this game out. So long that, ironically, 80% of my work for this RPG Maker game has been OUTSIDE RPG Maker. I think that's a good thing. The point is I've got a lot to talk about, and I want to eventually, but I'm trying to cut this down into tiny little chunks as best I can.

And that's all for this first blog. I'll go into a bit more detail about the actual structure of the game later.